Lily's House Read online

  Legend Press Ltd, 107-111 Fleet Street, London, EC4A 2AB

  [email protected] | www.legendpress.co.uk

  Contents © Cassandra Parkin 2016

  The right of the above author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.

  Print ISBN 978-1-7850793-4-4

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-7850793-5-1

  Set in Times. Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International.

  Cover design by Simon Levy www.simonlevyassociates.co.uk

  All characters, other than those clearly in the public domain, and place names, other than those well-established such as towns and cities, are fictitious and any resemblance is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  Cassandra Parkin grew up in Hull, and now lives in East Yorkshire. Her short story collection, New World Fairy Tales (Salt Publishing, 2011), won the 2011 Scott Prize for Short Stories. Her work has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies. Lily’s House is her third novel.

  Visit Cassandra at

  cassandraparkin.wordpress.com

  or on Twitter

  @cassandrajaneuk

  For Audrey, Dorothy, Millie and Anne

  You stand tall in my dreams

  Chapter One – Tuesday

  By the time we get off at the station, I’m so tired and disoriented that nothing feels real. The judder of my suitcase wheels as we cross the broken asphalt of the car park shivers up the handle, into my hand and through my body. We’ve been in continuous motion for almost eleven hours.

  “Is it much further, Mum?” Marianne asks. She’s remembering her promise and trying not to complain, but I see her exhaustion in the shadows round her eyes. I take her hand and give it a squeeze, but I can’t speak. In fact, I can hardly breathe. I’m drowning in memories.

  Here are the trees in tall rows, a stately avenue to a long-vanished gateway. Here are the sharp points of gravel that I picked my way over with bare, tender feet (‘You know, you could put your shoes on, Jen.’ ‘I’m all right, Lily, I promise!’). Here’s where I’d step into the road to walk on the smooth cool yellow of the lines (‘Please, Lily, I promise I won’t get run over.’ And the way her shoulders moved when she laughed, the brightness in her eyes; ‘No, I know you won’t. You’ve got more sense than most adults.’). Here is the place where, one hot bright summer noon, she showed me a wild buddleia swarming with a million tortoiseshell butterflies, so sudden and so lovely I thought she must have conjured them. (‘Do you know, Jen, each butterfly means one happy moment in the next year? Let’s see how happy you’re going to be. Can you count them?’ And me, swelling with nine-year-old pride; ‘I can estimate them.’ ‘Estimate! My goodness, that sounds advanced.’ ‘Did you learn about estimating when you were at school, Lily? Or was it not invented when you were little?’) Here against the skin of my face and neck is the soft salty dampness that comes from being three minutes’ walk from the North Atlantic. The buddleia has been supplanted by a gigantic stand of bamboo. I want to take off my shoes.

  “Mum? Are you all right?”

  Marianne is a study in the surprising beauty that sometimes comes with poverty, lovely even though everything she wears needs replacing. Her fraying ballet pumps are covered in scuffmarks. Her thick black tights have a hole that began as small and inconspicuous, but has now stretched to reveal a large oval of her right calf. Two months ago and at my stern insistence, she reluctantly conceded that the polka-dot skirt she’s had since she was nine has reached the end of an honourable three-year service and is due for retirement; and yet here it is again, short and faded, trailing nylon thread where the hem’s ravelled, but (thanks to her persistent habit of growing upwards but not outwards) still just about wearable. Her lips have a smear of bright red lipstick and her wild brown corkscrew curls hang in careless clumps around her face.

  It doesn’t matter. Soon we’ll have enough money so she won’t have to dress in old clothes and laddered tights any more. My heart squeezes with love.

  “Are you all right?” she repeats as we climb the hill. When I don’t reply, she stops in front of me to make sure I’m listening.

  At the start of the journey I talked to her, trying not to mind our fellow passengers’ fascination. I told her how far we were going, how long it would take, then took a paper napkin and drew her a family tree. That’s your great-grandmother Lily. That’s your great-granddad, his name was Richard and he was killed in the war. That’s Lily’s sister Margaret, and after they were both widowed they moved to Cornwall and opened a hotel. Margaret was married but she never had children, and she had a weak heart and she died quite young, less than a year after her husband. His name? He was called Stanley. And on the next layer, that’s Lily’s son, another Richard. Richard was my dad, and he married Amanda – that’s my mum, your grandma. They had one child too, so another level. And that’s me. I married your dad. And that’s you. A sparse family tree, riddled with early deaths and notably lacking in menfolk, pruned ruthlessly down to the single green shoot that is my daughter.

  As the landscape from the window changed, I laid my hands in my lap and grew silent. Now we’re here, seduced by the beautiful familiarity of everything I see, I’m afraid to speak for fear of what I might say. I feel so lost and weightless without Daniel. I have to look over my shoulder to make myself understand that he’s really not with me.

  “Nearly there,” I tell her, and start walking again.

  “I’m so afraid,” Daniel said to me this morning as we lay half dozing in each other’s arms. We’d discussed this after sex the night before, a frantic urgent coupling driven by his distress, but he woke me before the alarm so we could talk more.

  “What’s wrong?” I meant to be kind and not snippy, but it was an effort to concentrate on him. For me, journeys begin in my heart and mind. My body was in the bed with him but the rest of me was already far away, reluctant to be called back.

  “What if she does something to turn you against me?”

  “She’s dead. What can she do?”

  “I don’t know, but she hated me. No, don’t try and tell me she liked me, we both know that’s not true. And she was a witch. That’s where you get it from. That’s how you knew she was going to die.”

  Daniel’s always liked to believe I have second sight, inherited from my grandmother. I’ve told him that what he sees in me is coincidence, not magic, but his belief is unshakeable. I’m not entirely sure he’s wrong about Lily.

  “I should come with you.”

  I took a deep breath, forced myself to be patient.

  “We talked about this, remember? You can’t. You’ve got rehearsals.”

  “They could manage without me for a few days.”

  “Yes, but they don’t have to, do they? Look, we won’t be long there, you know we won’t, I promise. And when the flat’s sold we’ll be rich. We’ll stop renting and build our dream house.”

  “I hate it when you go away.”

  “I know, but there’s no way round it. You have to stay and I have to go.”

  He stroked my cheek.

  “I’ll count the minutes until you come back.”

  “Mum?” Marianne pats my arm to get my attention. I force myself to stop worrying about Daniel so I can concentrate on what she’s saying. “Is it li
ke you remember it?”

  I swallow hard, and nod.

  “You’re sure we’re not lost? Because I’ve got my mobile, I can Google-map directions.”

  I roll my eyes and keep walking, the pavement tapping and tapping against my shoes. Marianne looks worried and unhappy. The faint sulkiness that comes over her when she’s really tired weighs down her shoulders. Her refusal to credit me with knowing anything she doesn’t is one of the most annoying signs of her growing up.

  For more than thirteen years, I’ve visited this place only in the subtly altered perspectives of my dreams. I was afraid I’d find it unfamiliar. Now I’m here, I realise I could never, ever forget. When I’m an old woman, my body will still remember every inch of this winding road, and the ghostly histories of every vanished summer. I’d like to tell Marianne this is the landscape of my innermost heart, and I could find my way to Lily’s house even if I was dying. But it’s too difficult and I’m too tired, so I rehearse stories in my head instead, considering how it might feel to share them.

  That house belonged to two doctors who were married and had the same surname. The husband was called by his surname, Doctor – something, I can’t remember – and his wife was called by her first name. Doctor Della. And whenever Lily’s friends talked about her – which they did a lot because they were always on about their health – they’d always call her a lady doctor. They’d say, ‘Doctor Della, the lady doctor, she’s very good, you know.’ To show they didn’t feel short-changed. Then when they went home, Lily would laugh and say you’d think we were still fighting for the vote.

  Tell me some more, the imaginary Marianne begs me.

  The man who owned that pink bungalow there had a beautiful fat fuchsia. I used to pop the buds when I went past, and one day he saw me, and he came out and shouted at me until I cried. When Lily found out she got this look on her face, and said he should be more careful. She stole a cutting from the fuchsia and put it in a black envelope and wrote his name on it. And the very next day while we were having breakfast, he walked in front of the post-van. He was in hospital for the rest of the summer. I remember Lily hearing the ambulance and going to look. And when she found out who it was she smiled to herself, and I was never sure if she’d made it happen.

  “That bungalow,” I say out loud. “It was pink then too.”

  Marianne stares at it as if she’s trying to see through the walls.

  And you see that house there? I continue. They had a huge fluffy cat that was completely insane. Its owners both worked and it got lonely, so it used to sit out on the path and meow, and if you paid it any attention at all, it followed you home and flopped around on the carpet. I’m brittle with the need to avoid giving too much away, but surely this detail will be safe. I will tell her about the cat later, and her face will turn soft and yearning at the thought of a cat so loving, it would follow a stranger home. So, of course, I’d be out here every morning at half past eight to make it come home with me.

  Didn’t Lily mind?

  She just used to say, ‘As long as it’s not getting fed.’ Every morning for weeks and weeks – as long as it’s not getting fed. I think she thought it wasn’t stealing unless we started feeding it.

  What was the cat called? She’ll want to know that, of course.

  I don’t know. I’ll have to confess. Lily never spoke to the people who lived in that house, so we never found out. I used to call it Molly, but I didn’t even know if it was a boy or a girl.

  We’re approaching the top of the hill. I can see the tall cream curve of the great house now, and the wide bow window where the red lamp bloomed behind velvet curtains. Once, before the tumbling price of tin forced the break-up of all the great estates, this pathway would have led through the newly stocked gardens. Another few paces, and I see the slate roof that the herring gulls slid down on splayed feet, glaring at you from mad yellow eyes as if everything wrong in the world was your fault and soon they’d take their revenge. I used to ache to stroke their pristine feathers. I had fantasies of taming a gull to eat from my hand. But even when I threw long rubbery strands of bacon rind in desperate supplication, holding my breath as they caught them in their fierce beaks, they’d still give me that contemptuous round-eyed glare: We’ll eat your stupid bacon rind if you’re offering, but we still hate you.

  If I think about any of this too long I’ll come apart.

  “Nearly there now,” I manage, swallowing hard. “That one.”

  “That one?” Marianne catches her breath in amazement.

  “Not all of it. It’s converted into flats.”

  “Which bit? Downstairs?”

  Since Marianne was a very little girl, she’s expressed her secret wishes in a very particular way. When she’s hoping for a certain answer, she’ll ask about a less desirable one instead, and then (if that happens to be what’s true) she’ll pretend that was what she wanted all along.

  “Upstairs,” I tell her, and feel the incredulous pleasure on her face lick treacherously at my heart.

  “What can you see from the window? Does it look over the town?”

  “Look out there,” Lily tells me, beckoning me into the bay window. I’m in my green nightdress embroidered with the little cross-stitch girl in the poke bonnet. My feet enjoy the thick pile of the grass-coloured carpet. The carpet is magical to me, because you can draw patterns on by stroking the pile in the wrong direction.

  “See the lights on the ocean?” Lily continues. “That’s a huge ship full of rich passengers on a cruise. They’re dressed up in their best clothes for dinner, and soon they’ll go back to their tiny little cabins to sleep.” She laughs. “Some people are such fools, Jen. All that money to sleep in a room the size of a prison cell.”

  On her desk is a mortar and pestle with a coarse green powder in the bottom. I peer into it with interest.

  “What’s this? Can I touch it?”

  Lily takes it gently away. “Better not. It’s for Mrs Scobell. Something to make her husband less of a lazy misery guts.”

  “Is it magic?”

  “It’s lemon balm. Good for the spirit. She can make him a tea with it. It’ll make him nicer to live with.”

  “So it is magic.”

  “That’s what Mrs Scobell thinks.”

  “So it’s a real proper spell? It’ll work? Really work?”

  “She thinks it will, so it will. Now come on, off to bed with you. Even the seagulls are asleep by now.” Her hands on my shoulders, steering and directing me in the way that would have driven me wild from anyone else, but that I always loved from her.

  “That big bow window?” I point. “If you stand in it, you can see the sea.”

  I can’t help the quiver of pride when I see Marianne’s face.

  The gateposts were built to accommodate the sweep of a carriage. I wonder how many years it’s been since horses felt the gravel crunch and shift beneath their hooves, and if it felt rough or welcoming. I can picture them blowing through their noses, tired and patient as the steps were folded down. While the guests were led into the tall bright hallway, steam would rise from the horses’ coats in the stable’s comforting twilight. Perhaps the groom’s hands rested briefly on their velvet muzzles as they burrowed greedily in the manger for oats. The front door is right around the sweep, looking out over the remaining fragment of gardens. It’s hard work pulling our suitcases over the gravel. At the top of the stone steps, the front door waits.

  “Don’t sit in the middle of the steps,” Lily tells me, too gentle to count as a scolding. “You’re right in the way of everyone coming in and out.”

  “But they can go on either side of me.”

  “Not all of them. Mrs Shawcross from downstairs, she needs the whole width to herself. Have you watched her climbing the stairs? Huffing and puffing and rolling from side to side. She looks like a walrus, poor woman. She’d be better off going to live in the sea.”

  Her expression is so sweet and conspiratorial that I almost miss the spite. I’m
always surprised by Lily’s sharp edges. She enjoys being cruel about the neighbours who clearly find her charming, and look forward to seeing her.

  This is the Lily I need to remember. Not the woman who let me bring other people’s cats home and gave me bacon rind for the seagulls, but the Lily who dropped sharp bright truth from her lips, cutting everyone else to pieces. As I rummage in my handbag for the keys, Marianne turns her face towards the sunset and sighs deeply, as if she’s waking from a refreshing sleep.

  I know how she feels. It’s how I used to feel too.

  Inside the door now, and as we cross the grey stone floor made shiny by a million footsteps, my feet remember padding delicately barefoot across the glossy surface. Cold and unwelcoming as I left the yielding comfort of Lily’s carpets and ran downstairs. A smooth cool relief from the gravel on the way back in. My first discovery that the pain or pleasure of all sensory experiences is provisional only, shaped by what surrounds it. Our suitcases bump and struggle as we heave them up the stone staircase and I’m conscious that we must be making noise.

  Here is the subtle change in scent that comes at the top of the stairs, a slight difference in the air as the sea takes over from the garden. Here is the sage-green strip of carpet that runs down the centre of the boards to her front door. Here is the key with the loop of plaited string that surely, surely cannot be the one I made for her, decades ago. Here we are, myself and Marianne, going in through Lily’s front door. My dreams have never taken me this far, and Marianne is no longer a solemn scrap who trots sturdily beside me like a little curly lamb. My girlhood’s over. My daughter’s tall. I’m really here. This is now.

  The pink-and-gold flocked wallpaper in the hallway is shabby now, the colours fading, the edges beginning to peel above the radiator. Anxious to get my first look over, I plunge into the sitting room with its antique furniture and beautiful photographs and magnificent view of the sea, and onwards to the kitchen. I fling open the door to the walk-in pantry and see that even to the end of her life, Lily lined her shelves with paper and arranged her tins with the labels facing tidily outward. The top shelf was for the things I was forbidden to touch; the next shelf down for tins and baking ingredients and home-made jam. The lower shelves, empty now, held the things just for me: tinned rice pudding, peaches in syrup, butter-yellow sponge cake under a glass dome, the biscuit tin. From my brief glance inside, I see that Lily still kept an array of cake decorations in store and liked to hoard tinned fruit.